5 Adventures Tom Milligan never had and 1 he did
by Abstruse fangirl
Summary: Tom Milligan's lived more lives than even he can remember.


Beta: The absolutely fabulous persiflage.

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the Whoniverse; I only like to play with the characters.

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I.

It was absolutely pissing with rain outside, and of course, he had to go out into it. He stood at the small window in the bedroom of his flat and stared at the fat drops as they made their way down, down, down with the rest of their fellows.

He sighed and turned away from the window. He was going to get drenched.

First days were always the worst.

08:00 AM – Twin girls with a hacking cough, a mother who thinks she knows more about modern medicine than he does. The girls don't complain during their examination, although they do cringe every time their mother offers helpful suggestions. When he's finished writing out a prescription, their mother snatches it and declares that it's just what she would have prescribed. The girls turn back toward him as their mother drags them down the hallway toward the lift.

They smile sympathetically, and he smiles back.

09:00 AM – A five year old boy has somehow ingeniously managed to get a red Lego secured fairly snuggly in his left nostril. He doesn't cry once as Tom maneuvers it out (or the raisins stuffed in his ear).

When asked why he's stuffed several rather large golden raisins into his right ear, the boy's only reply is to hold up an old teddy bear. The bear is missing one eye, one ear, and has a left leg that is hanging by a thread.

"Teddy and I are twins," he says.

Tom nods and smiles, happy that the parents were able to get the boy to the doctor before he carried out the remainder of his dastardly plan. He suggested that he might miss that right eye when he gets a bit older, so he'd best hold on to it.

The boy sagely nods his head and declares that teddy agrees with him, so he will.

Tom ruffles the boys hair, smiles, and hands him a lolly (which the boy immediately turns over to teddy).

"Life's so simple when you're young," his mother says in a heavy Manchester accent.

"I suppose so," Tom replies as he watches the boy talking in hushed tones with his fuzzy friend. "All the same, I'd wager you might want to keep an eye on him. Just in case."

The mother nods and smiles, collects her young son, and heads for the lift.

Two hours into the day, and everything seemed to be proceeding like normal.

10:00 AM – A viciously scraped knee from a schoolyard fight.

10:40 AM – An 11 month old baby girl running a fever, brought in by a set of very frantic parents. Several minutes and a dose of Calpol later, both baby and parents are much less cranky**,** and much more willing to listen to a newly minted pediatrician dispense advice as to how best to handle such situations without running to hospital at the first sign of distress.

11:00 AM – A twelve year old boy brought in by his much older sister, with lacerations to the shin and forearms. Apparently both are the result of an ill-fated dare and a tumble with the neighbor's dog. His older sister seems to believe he's gotten exactly what he deserves.

When Tom's finished hearing the story, he silently agrees with her.

12:00 PM – Dr. Thomas Milligan sat in the second floor lounge, discussing the impact of the suggested changes to the NHS system and picking over the remains of a rather bland chicken salad sandwich when the floor beneath his feet gave a violent lurch.

He jumped up from his chair and crowded with his fellow physicians around the small break room window, chicken salad sandwich still in hand. Where the sun had been visible moments earlier, the sky was replaced with a sky of inky black, filled with the twinkle of stars.

The cries of small children and infants fill the air as the hospital is turned from a place of relative serenity and healing to a scene of absolute chaos. Tom tosses his ill-fated sandwich to the side, grabs his doctor's whites and runs out into the hall.

First days were rarely uneventful.

03:00 PM – A small, dark skinned woman and a tall gangly chap with bare feet and smart blue suit round a corner sharply and nearly knock over the medicine cart he's been pushing from room to room.

The woman tosses a smile and a muffled "sorry!" over her shoulder as she digs in to keep up with the man in blue. Tom thinks as he picks up the various items which have fallen to the floor in the near collision, that she has a lovely smile, even if her choice of companion is a bit…odd.

But then again, with space rhinos on the moon, there really wasn't much to be said about a rather manic man in blue running through the halls of Royal Hope barefoot, seemingly being chased down by his attending physician.

As the Judoon began to march down his floor, aiming their odd flashlights in the faces of the various residents of the children's ward, Tom supposes that the day could not get any odder.

"Oi! You there!" he says to one of the creatures that is being particularly rough with a teenager on crutches. "Careful! These are sick children, not animals."

The creature in front of him grunts, but is noticeably gentler with the wards as it makes its way down the hall.

"Justice is swift," it mutters as it marks the hand of the injured young man.

"Isn't it just?" Tom says, crossing his arms and staring down the huge alien.

The alien, for its part, has to good grace to look ashamed. Or at least Tom thought it did.

Hard to tell with Rhinos.

04:25 PM – He's running and running and running. He's running so hard that the side with the stitch has become a stitch with a side. He runs as fast as he can, his practical white trainers squeaking loudly as they brush against the linoleum floor. He knows he saw them go this way, or at least he thinks he did.

He's not altogether unsure that the lack of oxygen in the air hasn't begun to cause him to hallucinate.

He rounds a corner and sees them, standing there in a hallway, having some sort of heated discussion. He can hear snatches of conversation floating down towards him. And then the tall, skinny bloke in the suit takes the face of the girl with the gorgeous smile gently in his hands, and kisses her as if their lives depended on it.

Tom shakes his head as he sees the blue suit turn into a blur as the man turns and runs in the opposite direction. The girl stands in the middle of the hallway for a moment, dazed and giddy from the kiss. Briefly he wonders what it would feel like to kiss her lips, and have her look at him like that.

He shakes off the thought and continues on down another hallway. There are children in the cancer ward that are gasping for air; he knows he doesn't have to time to stand around and think about 'what if.'

04:45 PM – The air in the hospital is impossibly thin as Tom takes the last remaining oxygen tank and lugs it ups the stairs to the pediatric cancer unit. His brow glistens with sweat, and his lungs burn from the effort, but he is determined not to give up.

It takes every ounce of oxygen left in his body to propel him up the final few steps and down the hall to the room of a young girl named Marie Dubond, who was fighting a losing battle with leukemia. He secures the mask to her face, and holds her hand as she takes her first few breaths, struggling with the effort.

He slumps forward in the chair next to her bed. His last thoughts before darkness takes him are of the strange pair he's seen more than once running through the halls of the hospital, who found this last tank of oxygen for him as the rain fell upwards outside the hospital windows.

He hopes that they found whatever it was that they were looking for. He'd like to see them both again, alive & well, especially the petite medical student with the lovely smile.

He struggles to hold onto her name as exhaustion and lack of oxygen swallow him up.

"Jones," he mutters. "Martha Jones."

He never lets go of Marie Dubond's hand.

04:59 PM – "Clear!"

He can hear the calls and feel the frenetic energy of the emergency personnel as they attempt to revive the various patients slumped against furniture. He feels the lips pressed against his, the breath flowing into his mouth, the alternating pounding on his chest.

His first gasp for air comes to him almost in slow motion. For a moment, his mind had lazily entertained the thought of a certain pair of lips pressed against his, taking his breath away.

"You alright there?"

A skinny, serious type extends a hand to him and helps him up.

"Yea-yeah. I'm fine." He turns to look down the hall, and sees the various patients being attended to, helped to their feet, given fresh oxygen tanks. "What happened?"

"Well," says a rather dashing American man in a dark great coat. "We were just about to ask you the same thing."

Tom can't help but smile back when the man smiles down at him.

"Captain Jack Harkness," he says as he extends his hand. "You know the best thing for near death experiences and oxygen deprivation?"

Tom shakes his head groggily in response.

"A pint and some good conversation."

Tom finds it exceptionally difficult to turn down the offer. He's sure he hears the young medic who administered CPR to him mutter something along the lines of "there he goes again."

The next morning, Tom doesn't remember the dashing American, the trip to the moon, or the pint. But he does wonder why his bedroom is such a mess.

He showers and dresses, looking out of his bedroom window at the rain. He has the most curious thought that perhaps the rain should be going up.

"Must be first day jitters," he murmurs as he grabs his coffee cup and jacket.

He feels that his jitters are rather unfounded as the majority of the morning at work is rather uneventful (aside from the whispers among the patients about having been to the moon). He's heard the radio reports on his drive in about the psychotropic drugs found in the air supply and filtration system of the hospital.

Secretly he wishes that he could have been there to witness it all.

He grabs lunch at noon, just like on every other day at every other hospital he's ever worked in. He's just finishing up his sandwich when he sees a small, dark woman come into the lounge. She speaks briefly to another doctor there, something about a consult on a patient. Her eyes linger on him for just a moment, and she smiles.

He finds himself grinning back for no reason whatsoever.

II.

His sister had worked in that building, there at Canary Wharf. She was only a temp, and no one ever cared about them.

When he sees the flooding on the news, he jumps into his car and speeds down there, fighting his way through every sort of traffic jam and delay imaginable. He scans the area for her, looking for her distinctive short, spiked blonde haircut.

"Excuse me, but have you see this woman?" he says to anyone and everyone who will listen.

"No, I haven't" is the general response he gets. Few of them even look at the photograph before waving him away.

He searches the crowd frantically, asking the various police officers, medics, and the military men in the red caps. He's been there less than an hour and already he's exhausted.

"Excuse me miss," he says to a tall, red-headed woman, "but have you see this girl?"

She turns to look at him, at first seeming as if she were looking right through him. She sighs, looks at the photograph in his hand, studying it more carefully than anyone who'd come before her.

"No, mate. I'm sorry, but I haven't." Her eyes are sympathetic as she speaks to him, as if she knows something is wrong, something she can't fix, but that she should be fixing. "Have you tried the blokes in the red caps? They seem to be the ones in charge here."

His shoulders slump slightly as he tucks the picture of his sister back into his jacket pocket.

"I have. Fat lot of good they were."

He's beginning to feel desperate, hopeless, and alone. He flips open his mobile and tries calling his sister again. The call goes straight to voicemail.

"Did she work here, with this lot?"

"Yeah. She was just a temp though. Was more than a bit excited to be temping at HC Clements. Had only been here for six months." He turned to the woman and smiled. "She met a bloke here and everything. They were supposed to be getting married next month."

The tall woman reached out and engulfed him in a hug.

"Don't you worry, love. They're going to find her."

"Yeah." He let the woman go and reached into his pocket for the picture of his sister.

"I'll keep an eye peeled though. Pretty little thing that like, they'd all be daft to miss her."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it."

He turned and walked away, over to a group of emergency relief workers that he hadn't yet spoken to. Maybe they'd be more helpful than the last lot.

He vaguely hears the sound of a mild explosion over his shoulder, and the sound of heels clicking against the pavement as he walks away.

"What happened, what did they find? I'm sorry, did they find someone?"

He turns around just in time to see a young woman with blonde hair running full tilt toward the scene of what was once the HC Clements building. He drifts closer to them, instinctively hoping, praying, and wishing that yet another survivor has been pulled from the wreckage.

"I dunno. A bloke called the Doctor... or something."

"Well, where is he?" the blonde woman asks, somewhat agitated.

"They took him away. He's dead."

Tom sees the look on the woman's face, and wonders if it was a brother or a boyfriend, perhaps a husband who they'd pulled from the wreckage. Their eyes meet for a moment as she turns away from the scene.

He feels an itch in the back of his brain, like he's missing some minor detail, some bit of information that he used to know as clearly as he knew his own name, but that has somehow slid just outside of the realm of comprehension.

She holds his gaze for a moment longer, as if she's studying him, memorizing him, and then the moment passes.

"I'm sorry - did you know him? I mean... they didn't say his name. Could be any doctor."

And somehow, for no reason what so ever, Tom knows that it wouldn't be just any doctor. That there can be only one doctor. He shakes his head and turns back towards the medics (who are now packing up their gear and preparing to head off).

"I came so far."

He can hear the melancholy in the blonde woman's voice as he walks away. He wonders how far she's come to see this Doctor. He wonders if anyone would ever come as far for him.

"Excuse me," he says holding up the photo of his younger sister, "but have any of you gentlemen seen this girl?"

The words are barely out of his mouth before he feels two small arms wrap themselves around his waist.

"Tom!"

"Belinda!"

He picks her up and swings her around as the medics smile at the both of them. There haven't been many happy endings this night; they're glad that at least one more could be pulled from this wreckage.

There are times, weeks later, when it feels like the entire world has gone to shit, that he wonders if it would have been better for Belinda to have died in the wreckage of that building.

He doesn't know what surprised him more: seeing the tall red-headed woman again, running through the streets after their pickup truck, or finding out that his grandparents had actually been German refugees, and that his last name never had been nor ever would truly be Milligan. He supposed that even when the world forgot, the government never did.

He doesn't get to wonder long. The work camps are busy places, and he dare not sit still for too long. He picks up his shovel and drags it back over to the ditch where he's been working.

Down, in, and over.

Down, in and over.

It takes him a moment to register the mingled shouting of his fellow workers and the camp guards.

"The stars!" he hears Belinda rasp from somewhere behind him.

"Belinda!" he says, not unkindly. "You shouldn't be out here."

"Tom, look." She takes a bony hand and tilts his head toward the sky. "The stars, Tom. The stars are going out."

He reaches down and puts his arms around his sister.

"End of the world," he mutters.

"The night is always darkest before the dawn," she whispers.

He doesn't have the heart to tell her that he doesn't believe that another sun should rise on a world such as this one.

III. 

Rose and the Doctor ran down the hill, towards the line of people headed down the street. They tried everything, waving their hands in front of their faces, grabbing them, shaking them, but nothing worked.

It was clear to the Doctor that whatever signal was coming through the ear pieces was stronger than he could have possibly imagined.

"Come on!" he called as he grabbed Rose's hand.

Together they ran through the streets of London, swerving to avoid the mesmerized masses. All of these people, all of them going to die. The Doctor shook his head and tried not to think about.

They ran until they got to the end of the block. The Doctor skidded to a stop, looked left, before yanking Rose toward the right. They nearly ran straight into a young man kneeling down, tending to a wounded young girl. Her knee was bloody, but she otherwise appeared to be in good spirits.

The man whipped around as a young man to his left took a small handgun from inside his jacket and aimed it at them.

"Oi! Watch where you point that thing!" the Doctor shouted as both he & Rose instinctively raised their hands into the air.

"Sean!" the older man shouted at the boy. "Where did you get that? Give me that."

The boy sniffed and handed over the gun.

"It was me dad's. I took it from his desk when he an' me mum walked out of the house and started following them things."

The boy sniffed some more before wiping his nose and eyes on his dirty jacket sleeve.

The Doctor knelt down in front of him, and put his hands on his shoulders.

"I am sorry. I am so, so sorry."

The boy said nothing, and the Doctor sighed. He turned to the little girl sitting atop the overturned trash bin.

"And what's your name?"

The older man answered for her.

"She's Isabel; I think you've already met Sean."

"Indeed I have," the Doctor murmured, looking over his shoulder at the young boy sulking alone in the corner before turning back to them. "So that's Sean, Isabel, and sorry. Didn't catch your name."

"That," the young man said as he tied the makeshift bandage around the girl's knee, "is because I didn't give it." He stood up and dusted his hands on his dark denim jeans before extending one to the Doctor. "Tom Milligan."

"I'm the Doctor."

Tom appraised him as they slowly shook hands.

"The Doctor, eh? Well, we can never be short of those. Not with all those tin men walking around."

"They're called Cybermen," the Doctor supplied. He still hadn't let go of Tom's hand.

"Well," Tom said extracting his hand from the Doctor's grasp, "whatever they are, they need to be stopped."

The Doctor rocked back onto the heels of his feet and grinned at the young man in front of him.

"Couldn't agree more. In fact," he said turning full circle looking for Rose, "I should really get started on that. Rose!"

"Yeah?"

The Doctor spotted her in the corner, trying to coax a conversation out of the little boy who had displayed so much bravado only a moment ago.

"Time we were off."

"It's gonna be OK," she said as she leaned down and kissed the boy's forehead. "Trust me, the Doctor'll fix everything."

"Fat chance of that."

Rose got to her feet, gave the boy one last look before running to join the Doctor.

"Everything will be alright, won't it?"

The Doctor walked along with his hands in his pockets, trying to fight the itch at the back of his brain. That stubborn itch that told him that he was missing something important.

"Doctor!"

"What? Oh! Yes. Fine, Rose. Just fine." He reached down and took her hand even as he filed away the name of Tom Milligan. Perhaps another adventure, for another day. "Now, Allons-y!"

Tom Milligan looked on from the shadows as the two strangers ran off into the night.

"Good luck, Doctor," he said as they disappeared from sight. "You're going to need it."

_Two Years Later._

He felt Donna punch his arm – she was always doing that; hitting him, punching him and the like.

"She's engaged, you prawn."

"Really, who to?"

"Tom. That Tom Milligan. He's in pediatrics. Working out in Africa right now, and yes, I know. I've got a doctor who disappears off to distant places…"

The Doctor felt the wheels in his brain turning, the cogs spinning, as he tried to piece together two completely incongruent pieces of information.

Had Martha mentioned this Tom Milligan fellow? Clearly she had, or supposed that she had. He supposed that she probably had and that he was far too busy (as usual) nattering away at himself in his brain to have actually listened to her.

If only they knew how much he didn't say!

But Tom, Tom Milligan. Why was it so familiar?

And then it hit him. Parallel World. Running from the Cybermen. Ducking into a backstreet alley with Rose. And running into one Tom Milligan.

The itch he couldn't scratch. He supposed now he understood why. The fate of the universe had been put into the small but capable hands of one Martha Jones. And Martha's fate had been placed into the hands of one Thomas Milligan.

He supposed he hadn't been able to put his finger on exactly what it was about Tom that made his teeth itch because of the dual signals (Lumic's & the Master's). He should have been able to see this, to see all of it. But now that he could…

Funny how time worked.

The Doctor snapped himself out of it and came back as quickly as he'd left.

"HE is too skinny for words! You give him a hug, you get a paper cut."

"Oh, I'd rather you were fighting."

He didn't really, but he supposed it was what companions wanted to hear in a situation such as this.

"Speaking of which..."

Martha grabbed her walkie talkie and began issuing orders to the waiting UNIT troops at the ATMOS factory. He & Donna walked behind her, observing the military operation come together. His Martha Jones had certainly come into her own.

'So Martha's engaged to Tom Milligan,' he thought as they walked out to the ATMOS factory. 'Imagine that.'

He ran his tongue over his teeth (which still itched a fair amount more than they should) and wondered if he really had any right to be so bothered by this information. He supposed that given the way things turned out, he really did not.

IV.

Tom Milligan was used to giving inoculations and handing out sweets to petulant toddlers; he was not used to being the only available medic in what essentially amounted to a war zone.

He listened to the cries of the wounded as he crossed from one bloody, mangled body to another. He had to climb over dozens of corpses to locate the living. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which; so many had given up the hope that they'd clung to in the early days of the resistance. As the months wore on, their numbers dwindled under the sheer force of the UCF and the Toclafane.

But still, they kept fighting. Even when the cause seemed a lost one, they kept fighting.

He supposed that it fell to the very essence of what it meant to be human.

And as long as they kept on fighting, he would keep on mending them.

"Over here!" came a shout somewhere in the darkness.

"On my way!" he yelled back.

57 had been killed in the raid on the market that night.

30 had been wounded.

Thus far he'd been able to save 12 of them.

Damn this UCF and their brute force tactics. People had to eat. They had the right to live as they saw fit. Damn the UCF and the Toclafane and the Master for attempting to take from them what was inalienably theirs. Judging from the bodies strewn across the small clearing, the UCF would have to pry that right from their cold dead fingers.

The only problem was that slowly, but surely, they were doing just that.

Tom ran until he saw the waving lantern of the only other qualified medic in the area, an older gentleman who'd once practiced medicine with the naval forces.

"Over here, old chap! This one's wounded pretty badly." The older man knelt and began to check the wounded resistance fighter over. Thus far he'd surmised that the man had a dislocated shoulder, a bullet lodged somewhere in his upper thigh, and massive facial injuries.

No doubt he had been one of the many who'd stayed behind to fight for those who were too slow to flee, too old or weary to run.

"Milligan! Hand me your stethoscope."

Tom paused in his own examination of the man's wounds and silently handed it over to the older medic. He tried to keep the young man's mind off the injuries to nearly every portion of his body.

"So what's your name then?"

The young man coughed and spluttered before answering "Leo, Leo Jones."

"Well then, Leo, you just hold on. Soon Harry & I will have you right as rain. Just keep holding on."

Tom continued to try and staunch the flow of blood from the young man's thigh as the other medic listened intently to the wounded man's erratic heartbeat. The longer he listened, the more his face fell, until finally he removed the buds from his ears. He handed them back over to Tom with a small shake of his head.

He turned back to the young man who was fighting valiantly against the rather powerful desire to simply close his eyes, and drift away.

"Well, then chap. That must have been something to see! You against, what, three armed UCF guards? Good show, old man. Good show."

The young man was still now; he'd fought bravely in defense of what he believed in. But now that battle was over. The older physician reached down and held the hand of the dying man. He couldn't have been much younger than Tom; their roles could have so easily been reversed. Except Tom had never held a gun, never fired one. He'd always wanted to be a doctor, always wanted to heal people, not tear them apart.

'First do no harm.'

He'd sworn it when he took the Hippocratic Oath all those years ago. Or perhaps it just felt like a lifetime ago.

He wondered, as he looked on and watched the dying man before him fade on from this world to whatever lay beyond it, if their roles would have been reversed, if he would have had the courage to do what this young man had. As the older man reached down and closed the dead man's eyes, he hoped that when the time came, he would.

"Sullivan! Milligan! Get over here. We've found another one."

"Coming!" Harry yelled as he picked up his pack from the mud. "Come on, Tom. There might be more lives won yet."

Tom nodded in the darkness as he gathered his own medical supplies.

The two men rose in unison and headed off in the direction of the other man's voice. Perhaps in another age they would have stayed with the young man and buried him, given him the sort of sendoff that human beings were wont to give each other.

But not in this age of madness.

They'd been too late to help this young man, but perhaps tonight, they could save another life.

V.

In the end, it was simple.

He'd watched as she lay there, hidden on the stairwell, shivering and afraid. He'd looked on as she stood up, her belief in what she was doing clear (even if her belief in herself were more than a bit muddied). He'd stood by, with everyone else, as she walked out, alone, to meet the man who'd caused them all such pain, who'd taken away everything that they'd ever been, as a country, as a people, as a race.

He thought of his sister Belinda, long dead at the hands of the Toclafane.

'The night is always darkest just before the dawn.' Wasn't that what she always said?

If that was the case, then perhaps Martha Jones was their Northern Star, and soon, so very soon, would come the Doctor, and he would shine above them like the sun.

Martha believed it.

Belinda had believed.

Thousands had died believing it.

He took one last look at the masses, huddled there like animals in this house. Hiding from the very creature that lay outside their door, perpetuating their enslavement.

He took a moment to remember what it was that they fought for, that they died for.

And then he ran.

He ran and tried to convert this pretense of bravery into something real.

He ran towards mankind's greatest enemy.

He ran forward to protect what the Master could never be allowed to destroy.

He ran straight for him, and he fired.

He missed.

And One…

Tom sat in the open doorway of the TARDIS, his hands wrapped around the mug of steaming cocoa, and marveled at how their feet dangled over the edge, straight out into space. He looked on at the nebula in front of him, dazzling with its shades of blue and red and green. He gasped audibly as it began to shift, and the stars surrounding it began to shift with it.

The Dancing Nebula, the Doctor had called it.

Tom Milligan had no idea that space could be so beautiful. He turned and looked at Martha, seated there next to him, her skin glowing in the starlight.

He understood now why Martha would always answer whenever the Doctor called, why she'd always come running whenever he needed her. That man, that daft alien man, could offer her all of this, for the rest of her life.

He took a sip of his cocoa and returned his gaze to the Nebula which was swirling and swooping with such intricacy that he supposed it really could be a dance. To think that particles and gasses could move with such eloquence…

He saw it all now. A thousand lives unlived, a million possibilities, the Universe in all its majesty. He reached over and took her hand in his, smiling a bit as she enshrouded his one hand in the both of hers.

Martha turned towards him and smiled, a happier smile than the one he'd seen that first day at Royal Hope Hospital (though thanks to Jack he'd never remember it) or that first night as they drove back into the city from the coast (another memory that would forever be hers and hers alone).

'Let the Doctor give her the Universe,' he thought. 'He can have the Universe, and I can have this.'

"So then, what do you two lovebirds say. Ice Skating on the mineral lakes of Kur-han? Fancy that? We never did make it there, did we Martha? There is a winter festival going on right this moment that serves the best Beef Bourguignon you've ever tasted. Puts dear old Julia Childs' recipe to shame. And the flaming hot cocoas, oh Martha! You'd love it. You too Tom."

The Doctor continued his wind-up dance of piloting the TARDIS, but neither Tom nor Martha turned around.

Tom gave Martha's hand an encouraging squeeze.

"That sounds lovely, Doctor," Martha answered.

"Good. Best get those doors closed. Don't want to tempt fate, now do we?"

"No," Martha answered. "I suppose we don't."

She disentangled herself from Tom and pushed up from wooden floor of the TARDIS. Once the doors were secured and both empty mugs had been stowed away, Martha led Tom up the ramp the TARDIS console.

"Alright then!" the Doctor called out from the other side of the console. "Now that that's all settled, Tom Milligan, may I be the first to introduce you to the Universe."

The Doctor released the handbrake with his left hand and extended his right across the console to Tom**,** who accepted it gladly while using his other hand to grip the support rail and keep himself upright.

"So then," Martha said as the ancient engines of the TARDIS began to grind, "ready for an adventure?"

Tom reached out his arm, pulled her into a hug, and kissed the top of her head.

"With you Martha Jones? Always."


End file.
